AIG Execs Smooth Troubles Away With Exfoliating Face Treatment, Again

AIG’s sickliness has meant it needs more government cash, taking its tally to $150bn of the $700bn the US government initially splashed for the bailout. They only started out with $85bn! Fitch cut their rating of AIG to BBB yesterday, which is investor-speak for “not very good company”. What the blazes have they been spending it all on? 

Getting their hair did, that’s what! AIG has now committed PR hari-kiri twice recently with its rather ill-advised corporate jollies with taxpayer money. First up was the story on October 7th that a week after the first bailout, execs went to the St. Regis Resort in California for a week to get some headspace and chill out, spending $440,000 in all, including $23,00 on spa treatments. Most of them are grown men for god’s sake! Indulging metrosexuality with American tax dollars didn’t make anyone best pleased, least of all the House of Representatives who gave them a thorough scalding.

But those AIG boys love their hot stone treatments, and they’ve just been back for more in Phoenix, Arizona. This time they went rogue, removing all AIG logos from the resort and instructing hotel staff not to even say “AIG”. But of course it all came to light, thanks to some nice old-school undercover camerawork from ABC News. Big cheese Art Tambaro working out instead of going to meetings, execs staying in two-storey villas, some guy drinking a Corona – it was laid out in all its sick glory.

It’s another one of those stories that isn’t so much surprising as cathartic, allowing us to direct our nebulous recession worries onto some bespectacled suit. No-one’s buying AIG’s line that it’s all been paid for by corporate sponsors, because it doesn’t feel as good to let them off.

Why didn’t AIG just properly lay low for a while? No-one really believes that anyone’s going to stop spending money on executive luxuries, but we’ll gladly play along and get all outraged if it’s done so brazenly. Barclays, despite having tons of Arabian capital, are cancelling their seasonal parties out of appropriateness. You just know that the board are still going to have a Christmas tree made of edible gold leaf with Kylie as a fairy, but just as long as there was some contrition, we’ll be satisfied.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Hot Money | November 11, 2008 1:12PM |